Tag Archives: wool

Welcome, Lucy!

Uncategorized, ,

I think I have found my One True Crafting technique in needle felting. It’s like sculpture with therapeutic stabbiness and without the messy clay.

Here is my newest little creature – a lovely lady who’s name is clearly Lucy:

Lucy

Standing at just about 4″, she is small in stature but big in heart, all soft and warm in her wooly cloak. Her staff was the only really challenging part – I took some medium-gauge copper wire and poked it through her hand, and then felted the wool onto the wire. It was very stabby, but not so therapeutic – I managed to poke my index finger pretty sharply several times. Other than that, she is all wool. I was going to shape her face more, and maybe even add some embroidery for her features, but in the end I liked the Amish doll simplicity of her face so much that I didn’t want to change it.

Now all she needs is a flock of mini sheep to frolic and gambol around her.

 

Not baaaaaaad!

Fiber, , , ,

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. That was a friend of mine’s response to this, my first attempt at needle felting:

This took about an hour or so from start to finish, which included fussing around with the armature (read: pipe cleaner stolen from my children’s craft supplies) and a few false starts figuring out how much wool I needed for each stage of building up the body. Oh, and endlessly poking the legs to get all trace of the armature hidden.

Toward the end, I couldn’t help but feel a little like I was making some sort of demented voodoo doll, and that somewhere there was a poor little sheep thinking it had suddenly developed arthritis and migraines all at the same time.

Like I need another hobby

Fiber, , ,

But this one is fiber related, so that’s okay, right?

Last weekend I went to a local artisan’s festival here in town, and our local Waldorf-inspired school had a table filled with fantastic and fantastical things. I ended up buying a couple of lovely magical wands for the daughters of friends of mine (coincidentally made by another friend of mine, though I didn’t know that at the time). But, the thing that really caught my attention was the population of felted gnomes. Unspeakably cute and cuddly, I handled them way more than is decent. Yet, in the end, I could not quite bring myself to buy one. Something in my heart made me understand that I wanted – needed – to make my own, although I didn’t have the faintest clue how they were put together (fairy dust and love?).

If you aren’t familiar with this type of felted project, let me direct your attention to Felting Dreams (an etsy store), which has wonderful examples.

How I love the internet. Within 48 hours, I now know that what I want to learn how to do is called needle felting, and I have identified two books and about five websites that look promising. Oh, and I ordered a set of felting needles and a felting pad. Because what do I need? Another hobby. (And my very own felt gnome!)

 

Resume spinning

Spinning,

After a brief, frustration-related hiatus, I have returned to spinning. Everything was going so well with my beginner roving, but when I tried to pretend I could really spin it all fell apart. (Literally.) Luckily, my friend and fellow spinning novice could see what the problem was: I was trying to spin roving that was too thick. Turns out beginner roving is already thin enough to spin, but grown-up roving is meant for people who know enough to pull apart the roving into thinner strips. People who were not me, but now are me, because now I know to do this!

And the magical process by which stringy fluff becomes yarn can continue…

So, I’m now figuring out how to spin steadily, instead of parking the spindle to twist the fiber. While it is more of a juggling act (and so I’m sure much more entertaining to watch), the quality of the yarn is surprisingly better – my width is a lot more consistent and I over-spin much less.

Also, my friend now has a spinning wheel. As I told Redbeard about this, I made to sure to reassure him that I’m not ready for a wheel yet. He replied that he has already “resigned” himself to making room for one. So…. does that mean I can have one now? Because I think I really am ready.

 

Feeling All Spindly

knitting, ,

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how fun it would be to learn how to spin, and now, lo and behold, we spin! She invited a veteran spinner (and spinning teacher) to our small knitting group (average size = 4) and away we went. Our teacher was great: patient, low-key and, most importantly, patient. I came away with a spindle of a pretty green and surprisingly yarn-like substance:

The stuff on the right is what I spun. Me! And it started like the stuff on the left! It was kind of magical. It even – and this is the importantly part -continued to work outside of the knitting group. Amazing! Why am I still sitting here typing when I could go spin?